It’s not often a couple of creative types befuddle Apple with their content distribution model but the Academy Award-winning cinematographer Russell Boyd and a collective of Australian advertising writers and TV production companies have managed just that with an online horror sketch show that will be launched globally online this week.

What started out three years ago as a project which the creators of Watch With Mother planned for broadcast TV has ended up bypassing the medium altogether in favour of bundling the six-part series inside an app for Apple and Google Play and as individual episodes on iTunes.

The conundrum for Apple has been what The Glue Society and Revolver Films have wanted to do on the App store by bundling the entire Watch With Mother series in a single download – iTunes has conventionally been the place to distribute music, TV and films and the App store has been for, well , apps.

Although video is not yet available here, Google Play has fast tracked Watch with Mother in the United States as an app offering and possibly because of Google’s move, Apple has shown new found flexibility for the Australian project.

“Apple are getting their heads around it, to be honest," says Revolver’s managing director Michael Ritchie. “They said to us they haven’t seen anything like this where it is pure content packaged in an App. We had a really good conversation with them last week and we’ll do both iTunes and an App."

Clearly conscious of not wanting to upset the distribution and device powerhouse, The Glue Society’s Jonathan Kneebone, whose team devised and wrote the six-part series, says Apple has shown plenty of willingness to make the distribution idea work.

“They’re probably ahead of us, don’t forget," Kneebone says. “Apple is probably going to launch a whole new way of watching television which is going to do to TV what iTunes has done to music. We just might be in that weird middle ground when they are actually already up to something."

Weird is certainly the word many will use to describe Watch With Mother, a black comedy horror series which the creators hope will become an indie cult “brand".

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Broadcasters early on felt the horror genre to be too niche, so Glue and Revolver decided to go online for a global audience of fans following the horror, slasher and black comedy genres.

Watch With Mother will launch an online 90-second video trailer globally on Thursday that Mr Ritchie and Mr Kneebone want 10 million people to watch worldwide. They’re banking on 3 per cent of those viewers heading straight to Google Play and Apple’s iTunes and App stores to buy the series, creating a property with revenues between $600,000 and $3 million. That’s much more than some of the earliest offers from broadcasters for a $15,000 series commission.

“The trailer is a 90-second punch in the head, which is a long punch," Mr Ritchie says. “We’re pulling in a US [content] seeding company, Kindling, and they’ve already isolated the slasher fans, the pure horror fans the black comedy fans and the techies. We’ll take it to those subcultures and we hope it will spread from there."

And because Glue and Revolver have opted to go independent with their distribution model, conversations have been continuing with Australian, European and US Pay TV operators and emerging online content players such as the Sony Entertainment Network, which now want involvement in subsequent series, regardless of Google and Apple’s presence.

“They’ve realised we were going to do it alone, but they liked the material so much they feel they can broaden the audience for broadcast," Mr Ritchie said. He has just returned from discussions in the US.

Mr Kneebone said there has been no shortage of advice on how the group should tackle the revenue and distribution model for Watch With Mother but much of it was regurgitation.

“You have to accept no one is an expert right now with digital distribution," he said.

“If you are smartly naïve, there are some fantastic opportunities. But there are a lot of people pretending to know what is going on and what they will refer to is just the latest thing that was a success."